LAREI

Our Mission

The mission of the Environmental Health Service (EHS) is to perform high-quality research on the causes, prevention, and treatment of respiratory disease. Health effects of air pollution and other environmental stresses - indoor, outdoor, or occupational - are our primary focus.

Challenge

What are the health consequences of breathing polluted air? Are certain pollutants more dangerous than others? Are our children, the rapidly aging population, or individuals with heart disease or chronic lung disease at a greater risk?

To set protective air-quality standards that are stringent enough but still cost-effective, regulatory agencies need objective and reliable scientific information. The Environmental Health Service at Rancho has been providing public health agencies and the medical community with answers for over 20 years.

By carefully exposing human volunteers to various pollutants (e.g., ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide) inside environmental chambers, EHS researchers can carefully study how human beings cope with air pollution. Both healthy people and individuals with known heart or lung diseases have been studied in the chambers. Children have also been studied.

Another important research component involves field studies of volunteer panels to assess short-term pollution exposures and concurrent respiratory health changes. Field studies may employ free-living subjects or subjects exposed in our unique movable trailer chamber.

Clinical studies involving respiratory drugs have been effectively integrated into the EHS research program, due to the respiratory interest of research staff with access to a large pool of patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and who are available for investigations.